The Welcome Factor

Welcome to the six-hundred-million-and-first blog currently online today! Now, this isn’t an accurate number. It’s an idea of a number. A quick Google search will tell us that ‘over 600 million’ blogs are in existence today. Therefore, this cartoon blog is somewhere among the first of the next million blogs to pop up. This is a vanguard moment. And that’s what I’m going for: a pioneer blog that leads not just a million, but we can assume, millions.

You can imagine that launching ahead of the many millions of blogs to come, places this 'little cartoon blog’ (as it’ll affectionately become known) into a position of preeminent seniority that catapults it into a position of great influence. This is hard for our little blog to imagine now, at the time of its launch, but clearly we’ll have to hire staff around here, if for anything, to handle the admin stuff as we deal with international travel for speaking and all the interviews. This is simple planning that must happen when you launch today and not, say, oh, never.

Another statistic out there indicates there are 31.7 million active blogs online today (2020). Given that everybody is always trying to figure out ways to get more exercise into their lives, don’t confuse this to mean that blogs work out. They’re just words and images. An active blog is one that is tended to and taken care of; loved by its owner. Given the affection I have for drawing cartoons and writing little complete nothings, I plan to love this blog, and tend to its needs. If you find I’m not doing that, you should report me to the blog authorities pronto! But since that means I’d get a bad consequence, I don’t have any incentive to tell you who those authorities are or where to find them. I am not being difficult.

I have a serious job then, and I’m being serious. It’s my responsibility to try to create enough of an incentive in you (speaking of incentives) to keep you venturing back to see the latest and greatest on this blog. Because no one hired me to run this blog (a grave error), and there were no interviews or resumes that exchanged hands for me to land this job (a significant oversight), the situation we have is this: I have no idea what I’m doing here.

This might sound dire (and it is if you’re the actual blog, or possibly Stephanie’s reputation), but I believe in my heart of hearts that it’s surmountable. There are many factors involved in creating incentive in the reader to keep reading. Not having ever been a reading specialist, I’m going to guess it has something to do with holding interest. In the case of a G-rated cartoon blog, which this is, the options available to other sites, like offering nudity and/or free money and/or wish-granting, are nifty tricks I can't use. Alas, I’m left with the plodding of the hard work of writing and drawing things that resonate with you. Being an influencer is painstaking.

So, here’s my game plan. I intend to factor into my posts the things I anticipate will spark some curiosity in you that will cause you to walk around wondering about the world for days to the point that you can’t help yourself any longer and must run back to this blog in a curious frenzy to find out what the heck the deal is. It’s a doable plan.

[Disclaimer: I will never offer anything, free of charge or for a fee, that could be construed to be any kind of answer to "what the heck the deal is" by a reasonable person who, in conjunction, read this far.]

For my part, I plan to leverage my journey as a middle-aged human to spark questions and contemplations for both of us. I’m just as curious as you are about what this all is; living on this rare planet in this rare, spectacular albeit challenging life. My idea for this blog came from what I’ve been doing on my Facebook page for years: writing up musings on little slices of life that I hope might speak to others. Sometimes I’m expansive and express my bewilderment. Other times I’m completely goofing off. (Note all of the above.)

As for the cartoons--I’ve been toying with them lately. I’m not an artist, even though about hundred years ago I was. But you don’t need to be anything to make cartoons. You just have to make one and then treat it like it’s your pal. You giggle at each other. You chuckle at its anthropomorphized animals. You stick it on your pillow and hold its hand while you both fall asleep. You spend a bunch of loving, careful time with it. Then voila. You’ve created one.

In summary, as we close out our blog launch moment together, I want to say welcome to this space. I hope it’s a bit of a smile among the frowns we run into sometimes. Pass it on to others if anything here resonates with you. For me, my solitary goal for this blog is that it comes across as a ray of light, and is counted as a contribution to the crowdsourcing of positivity out there. I’m grateful if you ever want to let me know if you think I’m getting closer to or farther from hitting that mark.

For now, I plan to add a post every 7-10 days. The rest of the time I’ll be traveling and giving interviews. You can reach out to my staff with any questions or concerns.